Lookdev experiments II…

As you’ll have noticed I’ve been running a lot of art through Prisma lately, don’t worry, it’ll stop soon. But not before I post some of my experiments in non-photorealistic rendering!

While looking through Google Photos the other day I searched for “rocks”, I was sure I had taken a bunch of landscape pictures ages ago for scanning that I hadn’t used and the search turned up a few. These were taken about 3 years ago, on a smartphone, while pushing a buggy on a broken path, so the quality wasn’t particularly good. I figured if they wouldn’t cut the mustard for a realistic prop, I’d try something non-photoreal with them, maybe something that might feel at home in Okami or Child of Light. Although Agisoft Photoscan processed them into a 3D model quite well, there were some large holes which required fixing in Mudbox, and also missing texture information which I’m currently patching up. I made a low poly version and unwrapped it, baking out normals, ambient occlusion and albedo from the high res scan. I took the albedo texture generated and painted over it in Photoshop using some custom brushes and standard filters to see how if I could get a hand painted feel (the Prisma servers were down, this happens a lot!). I then applied similar techniques to the normal map, removing high frequency detail and generally softening most areas. I also added some geometry for a cel-shaded outline effect. Here are the results of this in real-time:

About me

Hey! I’m a Senior Designer/3D Generalist with an Emmy award-winning technology company, with over 14 years experience in the Irish games industry. I’ve also done some TV work at a twice Oscar nominated animation studio.